For Peace!

An often-overlooked aspect of the Peace Movement is how anti-militarist struggles have supported or been part of liberation movements. The 1950s to 1970s saw a period of major decolonial struggles, with many nations around the world fighting for independence. This section shows how these struggles prompted the peace and anti-militarist movement to reassess itself, form unlikely alliances, and respond to the ongoing legacy of colonialism in disarmament struggles. The Vietnam War was a major mobilising point for much of this, but the role of the British Army, European powers, the US, and NATO in the suppression of liberation struggles around the globe further highlighted the need to organise around both anti-militarism and anti-colonialism.

Long-running journals in the MayDay Rooms collection, such as Peace News and the Tricontinental Journal, provide an overview of how the global peace movement and anti-imperialist campaigns have intertwined in the post-war period. At the Tricontinental Conference in 1966 in Cuba, delegates called for the elimination of foreign military bases, an end to military pacts, the prohibition of nuclear weapons, and the withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam. This position is also reflected in Peace News, which, whilst retaining its pacifist stance, supported national liberation campaigns against British colonialism throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, emphasising the violence of British colonial policing within the broader Cold War context.